1873–74 Scottish Cup
Football (soccer) competition, played among 16 teams from October 1873 to March 1874
The 1873–74 Scottish Cup – officially the Scottish Football Association Challenge Cup – was the first season of Scotland's most prestigious football knockout competition. A total of 16 teams from the west of Scotland entered the competition, but only 14 played a match after two teams withdrew. The competition began with a match between Renton and Kilmarnock on 18 October 1873 and concluded with the final on 21 March 1874. After 16 matches and 38 goals, the inaugural cup was won by Queen's Park who defeated fellow Glasgow club Clydesdale 2–0 in the final.
The sixteen teams that entered the competition consisted of the eight founder members of the Scottish Football Association (SFA) – namely Clydesdale, Dumbreck, Eastern, Granville, Kilmarnock, Queen's Park, Vale of Leven and the 3rd Lanarkshire Rifle Volunteers – as well as Alexandra Athletic, Blythswood, Callander, Dumbarton, Renton, Rovers, Southern and Western. Subscription fees from 15 of these clubs were used to pay for the Scottish Cup trophy which the teams would compete for. Unlike the FA Cup, the original trophy is still awarded to the winners of the competition. It is the oldest trophy in association football and the oldest national trophy in the world.
Background
Queen's Park had been founded in July 1867 and became the first Scottish club to join the previously solely England-based Football Association three years later. They had contributed to the cost of the FA Cup trophy and entered the competition in its inaugural season.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2666234. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1873, 1874 and 1867.
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